trust my affection and my word, don't come near me; don't call upon me to prove myself no unnatural parent, no liar; you only offer me a fresh indignity, in addition to your other offences, while you do so." Sir, I believe that the paragraph to which I object, is only the counterpart of much erroneous doctrine which has driven and kept sinners from Christ, instead of drawing them to the foot of his cross, and that it is the clearer and more scriptural proclamation of the gospel of salvation at once by grace, through faith, to every converted sinner, and holiness as the fruit and evidence of this salvation by modern Revivalists that has made their addresses so wonderfully powerful, through the blessing of the Spirit, in winning souls to Christ as the way to a throne of grace and a crown of glory: "I, when I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me." For the forgiveness of his daily sins the child of God (by faith) may and ought to ask, but not for faith to believe that God is willing to grant what He has promised to give, or that he is as good as His word, or a God of truth. The believer may and will confess the weakness of his faith as his sin, and say, "Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief;" but when the disciples prayed, "Lord, increase our faith," what was the answer? "If ye had faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye might say to this sycamore tree," &c. What was this but a rebuke for their want of faith? How often did their loving Master administer to them similar rebukes? Nowhere, so far as I see, is the least countenance given to deferring faith on account of a want of repentance; this would be giving our repentance a part in our salvation. But it may be asked, if repentance is not to be sought, what is the meaning of such passages as Jeremiah xxxi. 18, and 2 Cor. vii. 10? I think a comparison of the former with Ps. lxxx. 7, must convince any one that both are prayers for the conversion of the nature for their restoration to God's favour; and St. Paul was speaking of that conviction of sin which issues in a change of mind, purpose, and conduct, but it was the apostle's admonition, which, under God, produced this conviction and repentance, and we hear nowhere of the Corinthians being exhorted to pray for them. July 15th, 1861. -- FIDUS. [NOTE. We do not think the paragraph to which "Fidus" objects in our review of Madame Guyon is chargeable with the doctrinal error which, if we understand him clearly, he brings against it. We think his own statements obscure, and, on some points, unscriptural. There is, no doubt, a way of stating the doctrine of repentance, so as to make it a condition of pardon; the sinner presenting, as it were, his repentance at the cross, and bringing away his pardon in exchange. This is one grievous error. Another-and that against which the remarks in our review were directed-is one into which we fear some of our Revivalists have fallen. They overlook the necessity of repentance altogether, and encourage men, living to that hour in shameful and open vices, to expect at once a sense of their adoption into the family of God, and boldly to lay claim to it by virtue of what we fear is but too frequently a merely historical assent. Our review stated, we think, nothing more than the plain scriptural doctrine contained in the text, which tells us that the Lord Jesus Christ is "exalted to be a Prince and a Saviour, that He may give repentance to Israel and remission of sins.' We think that our review gives both a fuller and a clearer view of the gospel than "Fidus" gives when he writes: "the gospel bids men everywhere thus to repent, and to believe, that if they return to him as the prodigal to the father, he will return to them." The gospel does more than this. It gives them power to repent and power to believe; "power," in a word, "to become the sons of God." "Fidus" is a parochial clergyman: yet he says, "the gospel nowhere calls upon us to seek for repentance and faith; the thing is as impossible as unscriptural." This seems strange doctrine from one who leads the devotion of his congregation thus: "That it may please Thee to give us true repentance, to forgive us all our sins, negligences, and ignorances, and to endue us with the grace of Thy Holy Spirit to amend our lives, according to Thy holy word. We beseech Thee to hear us, good Lord!" We publish his remonstrance to shew that our caution was by no means a needless one.-EDITOR.] HOOPER ON THE REVELATION, &c. 1. The Revelation of Jesus Christ by John: Expounded by Francis Bodfield Hooper, Rector of Upton Warren, in Worcestershire. 2 Vols. 8vo. Rivingtons. 1861. 2. The Prophecies of Daniel, Collated and Expounded. Extracted from the above. 32 pp. 8vo. JUDGING by the great number of books and pamphlets on the subject, which issue from the press in an ever-rolling tide, the interpretation of prophecy is the ruling passion of the day. Were we to notice only a tenth of those which come before us, our pages would be little more than a journal of prophetic studies. It is easy to perceive, without very close inspection, that no inconsiderable proportion of these, however well meant, are not of much real value. The writers appear to have been struck with an apparent coincidence between something,-a date perhaps, or a figure of speech, or a symbolic name, or the mere similarity of a sound,-something, however, in prophecy and the great occurrence of the day: a battle, or an earthquake, or a new administration; this forms the basis of the scheme. Other parts of the great book of prophecy unfulfilled are made to bend to this. It is Joseph's sheaf, and the other sheaves stand round about and make obeisance to this sheaf. Much cannot be expected from writers of this class; yet, if sincere and diligent, they may sometimes stumble upon an important discovery; indeed, there are few of them from whom something may not be learned. When we are searching for treasure hid in a field, the labour is not lost which ploughs up a single furlong, and demonstrates, if nothing more, that in that portion of the estate, at least, the prize is not concealed. In science, the failure of one experiment often leads to the success of another. It is something to know where the truth does not lie, before one sets about the investigation of the further question, namely, where it may probably be found. The field is narrowed for us; and the baffled search of others gives, perhaps, the right direction, and at length a successful issue to our own pursuit. This consideration alone ought to rescue the study of prophecy, however feebly prosecuted, from the contempt with which it is too frequently assailed. We must confess the class of writers we allude to are often sufficiently provoking. Their confidence is generally in full proportion to their ignorance. And no controversialists are more ready to assume airs of importance, and to indulge in rude personalities. Yet we are not sure that the greater amount of error does not lie upon the other side. Is it quite fair to meet every attempt to fix the date of an unaccomplished prediction with the well-worn sarcasm, that prophecy was not given to make ours a generation of prophets? We will even go further, and ask if it be consistent with the respect which is due, not merely to honest if misdirected zeal and industry, but the word of God itself? Most of the arguments we hear against the study of prophecy are a scarcely disguised repetition of the Romish argument against the indiscriminate reading of the whole, or any other part, of the Sacred Scriptures. In conducting our periodical, we feel the difficulties on either side. Many of our readers would not be sorry, they give us to understand, if prophetical subjects were excluded from our pages. Others, equally entitled to a respectful hearing, would be well pleased, they tell us, if we paid more attention to the subject. Our own judgment lies between the two: we cannot undertake to exclude all reference to so important a branch of biblical study; we cannot undertake to make it prominent. If we can now and then find room for a review or essay, it is all that we can promise; and we wish to do this rather in the way of marking down the progress of prophetical research, than of making ourselves the organ of any school or the advocates of any system of interpretation. It is in this spirit that we offer a few remarks upon the laborious work before us. Mr. Hooper may justly claim attention, from the originality of some of his views, as well as the intense labour and the vast amount of patient learning and investigation he has expended upon this great work. It would speak ill for the church of England and the Evangelical clergy, if such a writer did not meet at their hands with at least a kind and patient hearing, and with the respect which belongs, in an age we are fond of calling superficial, to much deep research. His treatise on the Revelation is an elaborate exposition, extending to 1116 large octavo pages. We shall render some service to our readers if we can exhibit in a few pages a sort of bird'seye view of the author's scheme of arrangement and interpretation; and we shall attempt no more. It would be unbecoming in us to affect to sit in judgment on the work, unless we could give at large the reasons for our decisions, and this, within any space that we can devote to the subject, is quite impossible. We will endeavour to single out a few leading points; such as may enable the reader to form his own judg ment. "This book," he says, p. 3, "I take to extend from chap. vi. 1, to chap. xx. 10, and to contain a symbolical history of the first or Jewish dispensation. The first six will depict the history of the ages between the creation and the destruction of Jerusalem; the seventh seal marks off the sabbatical, millennial, or celestial age. Under the sixth seal, the first or Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem is symbolized. The seven trumpets mark out a transition period, apocalyptically included in the seventh seal, but chronologically lying between the sixth and seventh seals, as is shown by the non-occurrence of what is manifestly the period of the seventh seal (namely, the 1000 years of chap. xx. 4) till the end of the seventh trumpet. This period commences at B.C. 70. The seventh trumpet contains the history of the conflict between Christianity, Judaism, and Roman heathenism, from A.D. 1 to 70." The point of departure in this scheme is not altogether a novel one. The following, among other writers, have thought that the seven-sealed book began from a date prior to the time of St. John: viz., Origen, Eusebius, Epiphanius, Hippolytus, Victorinus, Hilary, Primasius, Bede, Ansbert, Ambrose, Jerome, Gregory, Aquinas; in short, "there is," Dr. Alford says, apparent consensus of the early expositors" on the point. Yet very few, perhaps only Berengaud and Bibliander, have explicitly placed the commencement at the creation. On the "an other hand, there are nearly as few modern expositors whose schemes do not commence from or after the date at which they suppose the Apocalypse to have been written. How has this difference in the views of ancient and modern interpreters arisen? It is to be found in the passage in chap. iv. 2: "I will show thee things which must be hereafter." The author contends that the rendering, "after these things, is to be preferred to hereafter, as well because the former is the more literal rendering, as because it brings to view the relation to the state of things described in the seven epistles, which is lost in the indefinite term hereafter." He contends that the former and more literal rendering leads to the conclusion that the things spoken of here are not all those that subsequently symbolized, but those only which were of primary and immediate interest to the churches, for whom the revelation was specially giventhe things which, we are told in the descriptive title of the book (i. I.), it was the special object of the revelation to show"the things which must shortly come to pass." And he thinks, at the same time (p. 5), that he finds, in the instruction given by the high priest at the opening of the vision (i. 19) an indication of the period to which it was designed that the revelation should primarily relate. The phrase in it, à péλλe yíveolar (not à deî yevéolai, as in iv. 1.), about to happen, is never applied to a series of events extending over many ages. It can properly be taken to refer only to the immediate future. So that when the high priest says, "Write the things which thou hast seen, and the things which are, and the things which are about to happen after these," the instruction must be taken to have reference to the events current in the apostle's generation; at the same time that this does not preclude the insertion on the one side (by way of introduction) of a narrative tracing the course of events leading to the state of things contemplated: nor, on the other, (by way of conclusion,) of a predictive intimation of the state in which they would ultimately issue. The grounds on which Mr. Hooper bases his exposition, and the claims he makes to a higher verification of it than is pos sessed by any other scheme, are such as these that it was the custom of the apostles' age to exhibit the Jewish history from the creation in a symbolical form that it was at that time believed that the existing dispensation would consist of seven ages, of which the first six would extend to 6000 years, and the seventh would be a millennium of sabbatical rest; and that the cardinal epochs of the Jewish history were now six, namely, the Creation, the Deluge, the Fall, the Exode, the building of the Temple, and the first destruction of Jerusalem. When these considerations are taken into account, and it is seen that the roll is divided into seven portions, of which the seventh is a Sabbatic millennium, he concludes that there is a strong à priori |